In Harm's Way (19 page)

He decided to mention the empty bay when he reconnected with Fiona.

“Does Kira use that car?”

Fiona gave him a sideways glance and crossed the drive. She keyed in a code and the first of the garage doors opened, revealing the empty space. Put her hands on her hips but said nothing.

“No, the vehicles are off-limits, except in emergencies. Though she must have taken it, because I’m sure it wasn’t stolen or anything. I could call her and ask, but I tried calling her earlier and her phone wasn’t picking up.”

“Not a big deal,” he said, wandering into the garage and admiring the two luxury cars in the other bays. He caught sight of a sheet of paper taped on the butt end of a tool cabinet. “LoJack,” he said.

“What?”

“Looks like the Engletons subscribe to a LoJack service. GPS boxes that can track cars down if they’re stolen.”

“That sounds like Michael. Should I call them and ask?”

“Can if you want. I don’t want to get Kira in any trouble. She’s had enough of it as it is. And to add insult to injury, if she’s taken off, then she’s probably lost her job.”

Fiona stood still as Walt wandered the garage.

“You think I should call the company first?” she asked.

“I think if you call, the Engletons will hear about it for sure, because there could be charges involved with tracking down a vehicle. I’ll bet Kira’s car is in the shop and she borrowed this one and didn’t dare tell you about it.”

“Probably.”

“I’d track
her
down first, you know?”

“Good idea.”

He held the door for her as she got into his Jeep, and she paused there a moment as if not knowing what to do. “You have to be careful,” she said.

“Why’s that?”

“I could get used to this.”

“Not such a bad thing.”

“You spoil me, I’ll be spoiled.”

“When you leave food on the shelf unattended, it spoils. When you pay attention to someone, they only get better.”

“I never would have figured you for a sweet-talker.”

“I suspect there are things about both of us that we have yet to learn. Isn’t that supposed to be the fun part?”

She didn’t answer. She pulled the door and he helped it shut, and only as he glanced at her through the windshield, as he came around the front of the Jeep, did it occur to him that with that statement he’d somehow bruised her. And he realized he had a lot to learn.

F
iona returned from her dinner with Walt and marched straight to the phone through a haze caused by constant flirting, two glasses of wine, and her unspoken concern for Kira. Her first instinct was to call Katherine, to try to find out if the anxiety she felt could be a result of her memory lapse, but she didn’t want to be overanalyzed and she didn’t need someone to question a decision she’d already made. So she Googled the name of the company on the sheet in the garage and asked how to go about tracking down a missing vehicle.

Angel rubbed warmly against her calf. Fiona reached down and cradled her in her lap and wondered if Angel and Beatrice would get along and whether or not it would ever come to that.

The man on the other end of the call spoke in a heavily accented Indian English that she found hard to understand. She repeated herself often, briefly losing track of her purpose, and finally determined that the company distinguished a missing vehicle from a stolen vehicle, and only offered their service for stolen vehicles.

The request to trace a stolen vehicle had to come from a police department. She was advised to report the vehicle as stolen and to tell the police department to make the request with their company as soon as possible. Vehicles reported within the first three hours of theft were statistically proven to suffer the least amount of damage and vandalism.

She hung up. Tried Kira’s cell phone for the umpteenth time in the past two days and listened as it went directly to voice mail, disconnecting without leaving a tenth message only to have it never returned.

She considered calling Kira’s parents, but knew of the strained relationship there and didn’t want to get the girl in trouble over nothing. But was it nothing? Was it a coincidence that Kira had been missing since Fiona had awakened from her comatose nightmare? Had she not tripped? Had Kira pushed her? Had Kira panicked and fled without calling an ambulance? What kind of argument could have preceded such an act? And why had Katherine said that the apology revealed by her hypnotism had come from a man and not a woman, if Kira had been the one apologizing? And why would Kira possibly have to apologize?

They both avoided driving the Engletons’ vehicles because of insurance coverage. Fiona had a hard time believing Kira would take one of the cars; if she had, then it spoke volumes about Kira’s mindset at the time. Finding the truck was more important than ever.

She felt a twinge of guilt. Why had she intentionally avoided telling Walt the missing vehicle was a pickup truck?

She locked the door to the cottage, grabbed up her camera and reconnected it to the laptop, quickly working through the shots of the Gale crime scene, her finger finally hovering over the mouse as a series of shots appeared on-screen: muddy tire impressions.

Walt had made it clear a pickup truck had left the tire impressions at the crime scene.

The missing pickup truck?
she wondered.

She double-clicked the first of the four images and it opened in its own window. She leaned in to take a closer look.

“
N
o photo to go with it,” Deputy David Blompier reported from the other side of Walt’s desk. He was balding, with an amiable face and bulging belly. He was under a second caution to begin a workout regimen and Walt feared he’d soon have to be suspended for failing to act upon the warning.

Walt was looking at a printout of Martel Gale’s bank account transaction report, forwarded through by e-mail, from Purchase Bank in Mobile, Louisiana.

“Gale used his ATM card a day after he died,” Walt noted.

“Withdrew the full four-hundred-dollar limit. Then again, the next business day: another four hundred.”

“And no photo.”

“Sawtooth National has stickers on their ATMs saying there are cameras in use, but there aren’t any. Remember? It came up last year in—”

“—that poacher case. Chasing that guy down. Yeah, I remember,” Walt said.

“His killer?” Blompier asked.

“We’re a long way from making that jump,” Walt said. “But it’s certainly possible. It’s good work, David.”

“Thanks. All I did was—”

“Get hold of the bank and find out if there’s a way to real-time monitor their ATM use. You looking for any OT pay?”

“Absolutely.”

“Let me know what the bank says.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And David?” Walt caught him at the door. Blompier turned in profile—a sight to behold.

“Yeah?”

“Hit the gym, and lay off the doughnuts. Last warning. You have to pass the course on the third try or it’s an automatic suspension.”

“Yes, sir.”

“My hands are tied on this.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We need you. You understand?”

“Got it.”

Walt fingered the page, wondering if the body had been found and robbed, or Gale’s wallet had been taken by his killer. His phone rang as if in response. Dr. Royal McClure, an M.D. who served as his medical examiner, informed him the results of the autopsy were in.

Walt called Boldt’s cell and reached him on Main Street, where he’d been window shopping. He picked him up and they drove north together.

“I’m glad you stayed,” Walt said, from behind the wheel of the Jeep.

“My wife gave me a reprieve. I figured I’m already here, why not tack on a long weekend. Don’t get this chance every day. I haven’t been over here in years, probably won’t be back anytime soon.”

Walt knew the truth—Boldt suspected Gale’s death tied into Vetta’s and knew that once he left the area, obtaining information would be increasingly difficult. He’d been anxiously awaiting the results of Gale’s autopsy and blood tox results.

Neither man mentioned or discussed any of this, and Walt wondered why not, but at the same time felt hesitant to broach the subject himself. The events of the past week had made him increasingly aware of, and sensitive to, the existence of secrets big and small and the role they played in his and other people’s lives. In some ways everyone was acting out a role, keeping a face on a much more complicated identity: health issues, relationships, fantasies, fears, phobias—so often held in check just below the surface, and the person living the lie, mole-whacking to keep the truths from surfacing at inopportune moments.

Walt parked in front of the medical building adjacent to the hospital and they entered.

Dr. Royal McClure’s age was deceptive. The white hair and liver spots suggested sixty, but he was fit and bright-eyed. He had an excitable manner and a calming voice, the two somehow working in concert to give the impression of a facile mind at work in a laid-back personality. He had rotated into the county’s mandatory medical examiner service a few years back, and had done such a good job Walt had put him on contract.

They were spared the body-on-a-gurney routine. McClure only brought out the body if Walt asked—which he rarely did—knowing Walt preferred an office visit to the hospital’s morgue.

“In the preliminary,” McClure began after introductions had been made, “I told you about the blunt trauma to the parietal and occipital plates of the skull.” He reached back and touched the back of his own head. “And my suspicions were borne out: that was indeed the cause of death. The guy was struck hard. It’s a clean blow. Something smooth. No bark or detritus in the hair or scalp. A single blow.

“There’s nothing much more to give you. Clean tox. No drugs or alcohol, tobacco, pot, nothing. Guy was a churchgoer, as far as I can tell. What I do have is speculative, or at least inconclusive, but nonetheless interesting, at least to me, which is why I thought you might want to hear it face-to-face.”

“Absolutely,” Walt said.

He placed down a stack of Fiona’s photographs. “Shots of the head injury and identifiers, including several tattoos. And, from the clothing,” he said, removing a plastic bag from a file box and laying it on his desk, “soil caught in the back pockets of both pant legs and both shoes. And not just soil, but clean soil. Clean soil and peat moss, would be my guess, though you may want the lab to run an analysis to nail that down more accurately. But my point is, it’s not your average dust bowl variety soil we typically see around here. Right? It’s more like garden variety.”

“Nursery?” Boldt said, drawing a sharp look from Walt.

“Why not? Sure. Nursery. It looks like what my wife and I use in our vegetable garden: black compost soil mixed with peat moss to hold in moisture. What it is
not
is the typical roadside dirt you see around here. It’s far more refined than that, and there’s no pebbles, leaf material, sticks. It’s clean.”

“That’s helpful,” Walt said. “Very helpful.”

“Which leads me to the only other thing I’ve got,” McClure said. “And honestly, I probably wouldn’t have noticed without the soil, or maybe I would have, who knows?” He laughed self-consciously, his self-deprecating humor one of the qualities Walt appreciated most about him. Rare in a doctor. “Earwax,” he said, fishing out a small plastic petri dish from the same cardboard box. The petri dish contained four cotton swabs on paper sticks.

“Earwax,” Walt repeated.

“Pollen,” Boldt said, craning his huge body over the desk for a closer look.

“The blue ribbon goes to the sergeant,” McClure said. “Very good, Detective.”

“We’ve used it a couple times. Once in a floater.”

“Pollen most often adheres to sinus membranes, antemortem, and/ or the cerumen—which is doc-speak for earwax—postmortem.” He pronounced it “mor-tem,” lending finality to the sound of the word. “I retrieved the cerumen, but found nothing in the sinuses. Ergo—”

“He was dragged through a garden or a flower bed, or thrown from a truck into a pile of debris,” Walt said.

“I’d go along with the former, but would lay doubt at the foot of the latter,” the doc said. “You can see by the strong orange color that the pollen was thick and apparently consistent. It had to be abundant.”

“This time of year?” Boldt asked. “Isn’t it a little late?”

“In nature, yes,” McClure said. “I’d agree. Quite late. But we have a very shortened growing season here, Detective. Extremely short. I would imagine any number of vegetables, or other flowering plants might be pollinating at this time, but I’m not a botanist. Sunflowers, maybe? The lab may be able to identify the pollen for you. But I thought its existence worth bringing to your attention.” He delivered this to Walt, who nodded and reached out to examine the petri dish.

“I’ll put a rush on it,” Walt said.

“The only other thing worth mentioning, and I think you’ll find this of some interest, is that a good number of the contusions and abrasions are also postmortem. Though scuffs on his knees and face are antemortem.”

“A struggle?” Walt said.

“If I had to guess, I’d say the blow from behind was enough to kill him, but possibly failed to do so right away. He went down. His brain hemorrhaged, but in those few conscious seconds it took the pressure on his brain to overcome him, maybe he managed to turn and get in a few blows on his attacker. They may have fought. I don’t know. His hands and forearms and mouth, all suggest such a struggle, an exchange of blows perhaps. Then the initial trauma caught up to him—any of the rest of us would have gone unconscious with such a blow, I think—it’s something of a medical miracle if he did not, but he was thick-boned and his skull may have protected him somewhat. His brain swamped, and he died.”

“And was dragged through a garden,” Walt said.